Review of Shades of Yesterday

Agatha Blades is another company taking advantage of the D20 Open Gaming License from Wizards of the Coast. Their campaign setting is called The Lands of Drel. Shades of Yesterday is their initial release. It is a free downloadable adventure obtained from their website and is suited for a group of four first-level characters.

The Premise:
The once-peaceful thorp of Aven has been getting reports about seeing a ghost that walks Eldon's Gorge, which was once a play area for children and a rendevous spot for young lovers. Most signifigantly , however, is that it has been identified as the ghost of Eldon, the town founder. the PCs must unravel the mystery of Eldon's ghost and the sinister happenings at the gorge.

SPOILER WARNING: Many plot points and suprises of the adventure will be discussed in this review. If you plan on playing in this adventure or, if your GM is using the Agatha Blades world of Drel, It is suggested that you stop reading now. Nobody likes having their fun spoiled by knowing things in advance (most people don't anyway).

What Ya Get:
Shades of Yesterday is available as a 39 page PDF file. You will need the Adobe Acrobat reader to view it. It is also available for download in a rich text (RTF) or Microsoft Word (DOC) format if you are unable to view PDF files or prefer one of the other formats. It is pure text and is devoid of any illustrations. As a companion download, you can get a zip-compressed file of maps in GIF format of the immediate area for the adventure.

Cost:
Nada. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Gratis. Free.

Appearance:
The appearance of Shades of Yesterday is clean and closely resembles the style that WotC has taken is laying out their own adventure modules - two-column text with narrative seperated off by grey boxes. Nothing especially wonderful or jarring here. At best it is utilitarian in nature which should make some happy and some wish for a little more life to it. There are some pretty bad spelling errors in the document such as "stake" instead of "steak" and several instances where a section of text was pasted twice one after the other. The section describing the Weeping Willow is the main culprit in this case. This was extremely annoying to me as it breaks the flow of my reading but you may not have as large a problem with it that I do.

PERSONAL NOTE: Any comments made on the appearance of the file is based from the PDF. I did not download the rich text or Word file so any differences that you note between my statements and your copy could be related to formatting and/or printer differences if you choose one of the other variants.

My biggest complaint, as far as appearance goes, lies with the seperate file of maps that you can download. The problem lies with two things - resolution and file format. The first problem is that the files are presented at 72dpi... which work great for the web... but not so good for printers which have a typical working standard of 300dpi. The other problem is that they were presented in GIF format... which tends to make large files. Saving them as JPEG wuuld have enormously cut down on the amount of space these things eat up. You'll also need to resize them in a program such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro if you want these maps to fit on a standard letter-size piece of paper. This also contributes to the poor printout quality. If you don't intend on using the maps, this might not matter to you, but I like to give handouts to players.

The adventure itself starts out with the standard stuff we've come to expect in all adventures. The introduction and the synopsis of the adventure. A very brief overview of the history of Aven is included which adds some nice flavor although it really isn't necessary for running the adventure unless you might have a bard or someone knowledgable in obscure history who might know something about Aven's past. One of the more prominent things of the introductory section is the inclusion of a timeline. Once the adventure begins, the PCs only have a set number of days to solve the mystery or Aven will be destroyed. The section wraps up with adventure lead-ins. No real new ground is broken here and most GMs will probably be able to just skip it outright.

The next ten pages all deal with Aven and its residents. Most of the brief information on Aven tends to concentrate on its economic aspects due to a major trade route and how that is influencing the growth of the thorpe and some of the most prominent stores and buildings. The vast bulk of this section is detailing the citizens. Some may not like what was done here, but all the adult citizens of Aven are given personalities... and information is cross-listed for both the huband and the wife even though they're following each other in the listings. This just seems needless and redundant to me, but it could be useful to harried GMs flipping through pages. Still this is useful information if you are planning on using Aven as a base of operations for your players. I question its inclusion in with an adventure module though considering the level of detail given to them.

The following section details Eldon's Gorge and the encounters that the PCs will have there. There are some especially nasty poison traps and a potential encounter with both a Choker and a small water elemental before the PCs will even get to the kobold lair and the kobold sorcerer that is the one really terrorizing the area. The PCs could also have an encounter with the undead due to an unknown ancient barrow that has cursed skeletons in it. There really isn't anything suprising or new here and the final encounter is something right out of a bad movie... the mad sorcerer facing down the determined party of adventurers. Conveniently enough, all his henchmen and warriors have all been disposed of and he left none for his own protection. That is the one flaw I have with this adventure. The kobold sorcerer could go down quickly to a determined party. This is offset somewhat by the viciousness of the kobold's rat familiar. As a GM, you may want to consider adding in a few guards unless the party has convinced the other kobolds that they can do away with their mad leader or if the party is having too easy a time of it.

Wrapping up Shades of Yesterday, we are given a conclusion that deals with wrapping up character hooks that caused the PCs to become involved in the first place, recommended rewards from the citizens of Aven and giving hints about possible places to continue the adventure from here. Again, as is the case with most adventures, its nothing that we haven't seen before. Two appendixes follow that provide D20 stats for the monsters encountered in the game as well as all of the citizens of Aven. The other appendix lists new items such as Firewine and Greenthumb's Mead (along with iniebriation charts for each) and the common knife.

Overall Impression:
Shades of Yesterday is a promising product that really could have used some proofreading and editting instead of a run through a spell checker. The thrope of Aven is interesting to read and the citizens are very well fleshed out but I see little reason to want to use the setting as there isn't anything happening there to encourage the PCs to stay once they've ended the kobold threat. While I realize that most players go through towns and usually move on, a lot of work seems to have gone into Aven for it to just be considered a throwaway. Perhaps Aven will play a greater role in the land of Drel and this is a early introduction to it. The adventure seems to take a backseat to all the other information and, as a result, the 39 pages seem a bit sparse of actual adventure instead of supplimentary information on the town and citizens. Still, however, the price is right and you might find it worth your time to take a look at Shades of Yesterday if nothing else to lift the well-developed Aven into your own campaign.

MetalMan signing off.